WAR (What Is It Good For?)
Much of what I’ve said on this is lost to social media ephemerality, but I need to revisit something I wrote two years ago about baseball needing new stats specifically focusing on how a player’s performance contributes to actual wins.
Specifically, I want stats that record a player’s “contribution to wins”. For example, something that tells me the degree to which a player’s on-base percentage has contributed to winning games. Similarly, something that tells me the degree to which a player’s fielding percentage contributed to winning games.
What made me start thinking about this once again is the fact that the Red Sox once again are sucking pretty hard, but all anyone ever talks about are stats that are about or ultimately source to individual achievement. In response to people raising whether or not the team’s issues are about coaching, Peter Abraham countered thusly:
Pete Fatse has been hitting coach since 2022. From 2022-24, Sox were 9th in the majors in runs, 5th in OPS, and 2nd in hits. This with a revolving-door roster, long-term injuries to key players, etc.
These collective runs, OPS, and hits are ultimately drawn from the individual player stats, and so they are only a measurement of collective individual achievement and tell us nothing about how these performances impacted the actual games. As I noted last year, you could have a player with one-hundred home runs on the season, but if they all came in losses, what does that stat really tell us?
Individual stats are great for determining salaries and are important for cults of personality, but baseball is not in fact a sport of individuals but one of teams. These stats feed into a player’s career but don’t tell us a thing about how good the player has been to the success of the team.
What I need here is some enterprising baseball stats nerd to work up these new stats. We don’t need to wait for Major League Baseball. Give me a stat (or multiple stats if that’s somehow easier or more sensible) measuring what portion of a batter’s hits, runs, on base, slugging, whatever numbers came in games that their team won. If we’re looking at a single stat, call it BWIN—Batter’s Contributions to Wins.
(Unclear to me if how you factor in, say, hits that came when a player’s team was already in the lead and maintained the lead for the rest of the game.)
Then extend the approach to other aspects of the game. PWIN for pitchers. FWIN for fielders. Baseball is a game of individual effort combining to collective success or failure, and we’re overdue for stats reflecting the latter.
Someone is out there complaining, “Isn’t that what WAR is for?” But I don’t find Wins Above Replacement to quite be what I mean. I don’t care about “how many more wins he's worth than a replacement-level player” which seems like a needlessly arcane thing. I don’t even understand what I’m looking at when I see a WAR number. I’m talking about something much cleaner.
Basically, give me a simple sense of the proportion of wins to which a player’s batting, fielding, or pitching contributed. I don’t care about comparing to a hypothetical other. Just a vanilla number: how well did this individual’s achievements contribute to won games.